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close relationships

Each week, we recap featured posts from Character & Context and other blogs around the cyberspace, plus a few news stories and tweets that might be worth a look. If you have an item you'd like us to consider, use the hashtag #SPSPblog or tweet us directly @spspnews.

Study of separated and active service member couples finds those who communicate better get benefits of better sleep

San Antonio, Texas – Service members, including both active and recently separated, have been called upon to fight overseas and to assist during natural disasters at home. They can face unique challenges when they return in both the workplace and at home. New research, focused on these service member couples in Oregon, confirms supportive, responsive partners provide a buffer to loneliness and sleep deficits among military couples.

Austin -- Money and parenting don't mix. That's according to new research that suggests that merely thinking about money diminishes the meaning people derive from parenting. The study is one among a growing number that identifies when, why, and how parenthood is associated with happiness or misery.

Austin -- With Valentine's Day around the corner, you may be thinking of pairing up two friends for a date. If you follow your instinct to play Cupid, it’ll pay off in happiness – not necessarily for the new couple, but definitely for you.

Austin -- Going on a double date may be more effective at reigniting passion in your own relationship than the classic candlelit dinner for two. According to new research, striking up a friendship with another couple in which you discuss personal details of your life will bring you closer to your own partner.

If you see your partner flirt with someone else, you may feel hurt, angry, and jealous. The last thing you might expect is to start thinking of yourself more like your rival. New research suggests just that: that jealousy can prompt people to change how they view themselves relative to competitors for their partners' attention.

Previous research has shown that individuals often will change their self-views to be more similar to someone to whom they want to get closer, such as a romantic partner.

Divorce has a bigger impact on child-parent relationships if it occurs in the first few years of the child's life, according to new research. Those who experience parental divorce early in their childhood tend to have more insecure relationships with their parents as adults than those who experience divorce later, researchers say.

"By studying variation in parental divorce, we are hoping to learn more about how early experiences predict the quality of people's close relationships later in life,” says R.

Being a good partner may make you a better parent, according to a new study. The same set of skills that we tap to be caring toward our partners is what we use to nurture our children, researchers found.

The study sought to examine how caregiving plays out in families – "how one relationship affects another relationship,” says Abigail Millings of the University of Bristol, lead author of the work published online this week in Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin.

It is not always best to forgive and forget in marriage, according to new research that looks at the costs of forgiveness. Sometimes expressing anger might be necessary to resolve a relationship problem – with the short-term discomfort of an angry but honest conversation benefiting the health of the relationship in the long-term.